Gur ko gobar karna inki mastery hai: FM attacks Congress, Venugopal says white paper hiding 'dark truths'

Sitharaman said the inflation rate was below 4 per cent in the last year of Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, but it remained significantly high during the 10-year UPA regime.

New Delhi: Government and Opposition on Saturday sparred in Rajya Sabha over Indian economy with Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman accusing the Congress of mastering the art of ruining accomplishments of its predecessors while KC Venugopal alleged that the Modi dispensation was hiding "dark truths".

"Gur ko gobar karna inki (Congress) mastery hai (Congress has a mastery of ruining something that has been accomplished)," she said.

Replying to a short duration discussion on 'White Paper on Indian Economy', Nirmala claimed that there was mismanagement of the economy during the UPA regime and it took ten years of hard work to put the economy back on track.

"Congress has mastery of ruining something that has been accomplished... In 2004, when PM Vajpayee's NDA Government handed it over to you with inflation below 4%, what did you do with it? Ill-targeted reckless fiscal policy, ill-targeted subsidies, wasteful expenditure, all done for political gains," she said.

The previous Congress government did complete developments in time but Prime Minister Narendra Modi is now personally monitoring progress of development projects, she said.

In a veiled attack on the Sonia Gandhi-headed National Advisory Council during the UPA regime, she said, "we need to have clean, accountable governance, and not governance through an extra-constitutional body."

She added, Congress fears people who could overshadow the 'first family' and citing names of great leaders like B R Ambedkar, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, and Karpoori Thakur.

Senior Congress MP Venugopal, who opened the debate for the Opposition, alleged that the White Paper was an attempt to divert attention from the burning issues of unemployment, price rise and farmers' distress.

Venugopal also asked the Finance Minister why there was no mention of demonetisation or of unemployment rate, poverty and rupee value in the White Paper. "This is actually not a white paper, this is a paper which is hiding the dark truths of this country," he said.

He also said with the BJP also announcing new guarantees, one has to think about the guarantees given by the Prime Minister on the two crore jobs, bringing back black money stashed abroad in 100 days, Rs 15 lakh to every citizen's bank account, doubling of farmers' income by 2022 and achieving USD-five-trillion economy by 2023.

Referring to the conferring of the country's highest civilian awards on PV Narasimha Rao, Charan Singh and MS Swaminathan, he welcomed the announcement but added, "you will use Bharat Ratna for political purposes."

Earlier initiating the debate, senior BJP MP Sushil Modi claimed that the previous UPA government was the "most corrupt regime" India ever had citing examples of scams such as the 2G, coal block allocation and Commonwealth Games among others. He said seven UPA ministers had to either resign or go to jail for corrupt activities.

"The decade of UPA was a lost decade. There was a leadership crisis. We lost economic growth. India became a fragile economy due to economic mismanagement," he said.

NCP's Fauzia Khan said, "more than calling it a white paper on the Indian economy, I would call it a white paper on the upcoming elections...corruption is on the rise but what can be done if the government refuses to see it. Look at it from the point of view of a common man. Go to a police station, go to a tehsil or go to any education office, you will see corruption there. How can you say there is no corruption when the common man experiences it everyday in his life?"